Question

I’m trying to get the values in column X at lines 5 to 5 + Y. I’m guessing there’s a quick way to do this with awk. How is this done?

Answer 1

I think this will work for you, untested:

awk 'NR >= 5 && NR <= 5 + Y { print $X }' file.txt

Obviously, substitute X and Y for some real values.

EDIT:

If X and Y are shell variables:

awk -v column="$X" -v range="$Y" 'NR >= 5 && NR <= 5 + range { print $column }' file.txt